


against the dying of the light

by tinydragon (tiny_dragon)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-31 08:28:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13971204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiny_dragon/pseuds/tinydragon
Summary: Will is very sick and Nico is sad. Nico's step-mother might be a witch. Finding words for things is really hard sometimes.





	against the dying of the light

**Author's Note:**

> hello! as im currently drowning in dissertation and have no time to write i decided to edit an old piece and make it work for solangelo. it was one of those weird stories i wrote years ago that i looked back on like 'wow, i don't hate this!' and it seemed to work for them soooo here it is! i hope you enjoy. it's a bit strange, but i think that's kind of what i had in mind when i wrote it
> 
> tw for terminal illness and discussion of death!

“I know it isn’t fair,” his step-mother says. She brushes her fringe from her eyes and her bangles jangle against the thin bones of her wrist. The paper of her skin reminds him of Will. It’s the opposite of nostalgia. “But you know what, Nico? Life isn’t fair.”

He’d known she was going to say that. He’d known it from the moment she’d opened her mouth. From the moment he’d opened his.

He’d known that this was pointless.

“Fine,” Nico says. He doesn’t say it really. He more spits the words out. As if his gums are made up of firewood and old shirts and the twists of his tongue are fireworks. He marches quite dramatically, deliberately, to the door, and hopes Persephone turns to watch them explode.

“Where are you going?” she demands. Hands on hips. Less reminiscent of Will, with red lipstick, with long hair. The perfect cliché. All she’s missing is the black cat. Nico supposes a black Labrador will make a decent replacement.

“To see Will.”

::

Will looks better than the last time Nico saw him.

It always feels like it’s been ages. Even when it hasn’t. Even when it’s been two days it feels like it’s been over a week – the clichés of a first teenage love. It never lasts but it feels like it’ll last forever and a day. It’s never actually as great as it feels in the moment. Nico plans to discourage both arguments, but the latter is easier to dispute. The former will need more time.

It’s as great as it actually feels. It must be, because Nico’s feeling it and nothing has ever felt so sharp and effervescent and real. It’s like putting on glasses. He notices the outlining colour of the leaves properly. He’d never noticed before that there were different shades of green and lines and layers, like palm maps on human hands. The colours feel more vivid and the birds sing louder. When his step-mom scowls he notices the wrinkles that span out from her red-matted lips, the chalky way in which the lipstick stretches over skin she refuses to allow to age.

Will gives Nico a smile like warm milk.

“Hey,” he says.

He looks better this time.

The last time Nico saw him, he had a nose bleed.

“Hey,” Nico replies, shyly. He shouldn’t be shy. You can’t look at a guy you spent an hour making out with on his parent’s couch a week ago and be shy.

Will makes him feel like a half-finished sentence.

::

They played a game on the phone once.  
Will wasn’t allowed to see anyone and Nico was bored, because he hadn’t wanted to see anyone who wasn’t Will. His dad and step-mom hated him spending all of his time up in his room, wilting like a sad old plant. Persephone’s words.

“I’m not a plant,” Nico told her. He hated old people and their insatiable desire to compare him to nature; his grandma always called him ‘petal’. His dad told him, when Nico was nervous about public speaking, that he was a mountain. Sometimes its almost better that he’s not around so much these days.

“All young boys are plants,” his step-mom said absent-mindedly. She rearranged the flower display on her windowsill. Persephone was very into the ornamental influence of nature. Then, she stepped over to the table, and crushed up some herbs, right on the pretty, lace-white table cloth.

“Fine,” Nico grumbled. “I’m a freaking cactus then.”

He’d told Will this once.

It might have been the same night that they played a game on the phone.

Nico isn’t sure what lead to the game, because memory is quite subjective. Nobody remembers the minute details. He probably didn’t smell the fresh, sharp sting of Colgate toothpaste when he’d first kissed Will. The brain likes to embellish; he’d probably smelled stale coffee. Whatever. It was still good. It was probably to do with English homework. Nico was usually complaining about English homework.

Will never had any homework. But he chuckled, and helped Nico with his anyway.

It was probably over English homework. Probably poetry. Fucking poets. Nico wouldn’t be surprised if Persephone took it up as a hobby, concocted up a potion to travel back in time and write bullshit ballads with the best of them, with Keats and Shelley, and old Wordsworth himself. It was the Romantic poets, who spurted out bullshit lines.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” Nico remembers himself saying. Voice high and mocking, and Will laughed. He didn’t point out that this was probably Nico’s exact vocal tone three years ago. Sixteen really isn’t that old.

“True art,” Will might have said. “Lonely as a cloud. God.”

“Clouds aren’t even lonely. They’re up there. With all the other clouds. Having a massive cloud party. How is that lonely?”

“No clue,” Will said. “Unless they’re all the same cloud, and it’s just one lonely cloud entity.”

“In which case,” Nico said, “he needs to get some major limb re-attachment surgery.”

Will laughed. Nico loved, loves, will always love the sound of Will’s laugh: the sharpness of raised breath, the surprised way in which it spurts from his lips. Like candlelight. And his mouth curls into a smile. Melting candlewax.

::

Will looks like a chess piece.

One of the white ones, because he’s become very pale. He’s always pale now. Even paler, like the time his mom accidentally set the fridge temperature too low, and their carton of milk froze up. White lumps of ice. That was what Will looked like on a really bad day.

Not today. Today he looks like a chess piece. Probably because Nico can’t really remember their shape. But he knows their solid figures curve and so does Will’s body. Probably not in all of the same places, but it’s not an up and down statue, at least. Will isn’t stoic; he’s human, he’s not a chess piece. Not really at all.

“My head hurts,” Nico tells him.

Will smiles, because he always smiles. Patches of blonde curls fall into his face. Nico pushes his fringe away so that he can see his eyes, because Nico fucking loves his eyes.

Will’s head probably hurts a lot more.

Will has never chastised him for his selfishness. He’s never stood up like a conservative Church boy and told Nico that caring too much about himself is a sin. Nico would have responded that caring so little about himself in comparison to the way he felt about Will was probably a sin too.

Will would have blushed. Nico would have kissed him underneath the blue sky church light that seeped in through the stain glass windows.

But that’s a daydream. They’ve never been in a church together.

They’re in Will’s front room.

Will reaches out his hand. Church boy hands. White as gloves. Fingers bent and curved and jagged, a squiggled line. A straight line drawn without a ruler –

A smaller chess piece.

Nico takes his hand and he feels the kind of warmth magic can’t create.

::

“Will rhymes with ill,” Will said once.

They were lying on the grass outside of Will’s house, pretending they were camping. They weren’t, because Mr and Mrs Solace were more neurotic than Jimmy Neutron – who probably wasn’t neurotic at all actually. But he had the appropriate surname. Maybe the Solaces should adopt it, as it was much more fitting to their way of thinking.

Will Neutron.

But the grass was damp beneath their skin and they held hands beneath the cream twinkle of moonlight and the soft sweep of stars. A few blocks away the swingset in the park creaked. A cat mewed in an alley way. A homeless person croaked out a few soft words.

They held hands and Nico could feel the tickly, wet stroke of green blades blushing against his neck. But the cool press of Will’s fingers was warmer than a fucking radiator. God.

“Will, ill,” Nico repeated. “It does. God.”

“I know,” Will said. “My parents were tempting fate when they named me. Why couldn’t they call me Alistair? Nothing rhymes with Alistair.”

“Alistair is an ugly name,” Nico told him. “Alistair Neutron.”

“What?” Will laughed, and Nico squeezed his hand.

“I mean, technically, they named you William,” Nico said. His heart was beating fast. They never talk about Will being sick. Just like they don’t talk about Nico’s dad never being around, or his step-mom being a witch. Or being crazy. Whichever one she actually is.

But now, but now maybe Will was going to talk. And Nico’s heart could burst through his skin like a dinosaur risen from the dead. Or a zombie. Or. Or a fucking vampire out of a coffin or a superhero out of a comic book or a sword out of a stone. If Will wanted to talk then Nico would listen. He would literally listen forever, until his hair turned grey, until the grass grew over his skin like weird fur and he became one with nature, like his damned family were so obsessed with.

He’d listen forever.

“Illiam,” Will mused. “Sounds like a Shakespeare character. I like that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They didn’t say anything else.

When they did, it was about Star Wars, and not being ill, and not the reasons why they were in Will’s back garden, and not camping, even though both of them hated the Great Outdoors and would die without Wi-Fi, probably. It was the sentiment.

But Nico was still listening. Just in case. He’d opened up his ears now, no point in closing them.

::

Sometimes Nico is disconcerted by the fact that Will seems to feel so little.

That’s not entirely true of course because Will feels all the array of emotions of the world, and Nico watches them form and flicker and fade over his face, because he’s there often enough to see the colours of all the different ones. Will feels so much, but he rarely ever breaks.

This is the difference between them.

Nico would break.

Nico would break like car tyres and morning. Nico would break like the crisp glow of starlight when interceded by a roof with dodgy, loose tiles that threaten to fall in the rain. When the light falls and it stops and it does nothing but light up the darkness that nobody sees anyway. Nico would break like a fingernail. Nico would break like a cheap McDonald’s happy meal toy on the second time it’s played with. Nico would break like a fast.

He’d break like the first line of a song, if it were him. And the music would keep playing, and he’d break over and over and over.

Will doesn’t break. At least not visibly.

Nico, for all that he maps the lines of his body and details the freckles on his skin in hidden places, and kisses his cheek, can’t actually see inside of Will’s body. Maybe his skeleton is shattered like a stained glass window in a fallen down church. It’d have to be a stained glass window though: vivacious colours dying the insides of his organs. Nothing could bleed into the cracks in Will’s body that was translucent.

So maybe he breaks. Quietly. Like car headlights.

Nico wants to hear him. He wants Will to shout. So that he can listen.

::

“I hope Persephone is a real witch,” Nico says.

“Really?”

Will is sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor. He’s wearing beach shorts, like he’s about to go surfing, and a Spiderman t-shirt. Something about this combination makes Nico want to kiss him. Maybe he’ll go to the beach first and inhale some sea spray to breathe away.

He’d already kissed him at the front door. He should probably stop being greedy.

“Kind of?”

Will looks up, blinking bleary blue eyes. Nico wants to compare them to gemstones or the sea. Truthfully they’re watery and pale. Pallid. Fuck it. He’s not a fucking Romantic poet, and Will’s no lyrical ballad. Nico doesn’t love him because he has fifteen metaphors for eyes. He loves him because he has eyes and ears and a mouth that makes bad jokes.

Some days Will doesn’t look his best.

Some days Will’s skinny arms and bloated fingers and beady little eyes like goldfish swimming really really fast remind him of –

Not songs, or pencil quotes written on the backs of school books.

They remind him of boys who are sick.

“If she’s a real witch,” Nico says, slowly. “She could make you all better,” beat, pause. Little drummer boy. A high note. A knock on the door. “She could make you stop feeling sick,” rat-a-tat-tat. “She could make you stop hurting.”

Will looks up.

He reaches out his hand. Touches it to Nico’s. His fingers open up like cage doors and Will’s thread through his own. Like a key in a lock. Not all metaphors have to be fucking weird. They hold hands (they’re always holding hands: Nico likes the rush of blood he feels in the back of his neck whenever they do, and Will’s just a sap), and Nico is still sitting on Will’s soft duvet covers.

He lowers himself down to the floor.

Will kisses his cheek.

“Thanks, witch boy,” he whispers. His eyes are pallid and worn and framed by shadows and bags, like someone has left a bottle of beer over his face overnight.

Nico loves his eyes because Will looks at him with them and decides he likes the person that he’s looking at.

::

“And, of course, that means I’m a witch too,” Nico says.

“A witch boyfriend,” Will muses. “I see no faults in this. Great plan.”

“I know,” Nico says. “Get us a pen, will you? And can I write in your notebook?”

“That’s my space notepad. It better be good,” Will says. He passes Nico a pen. It’s green. It’ll do. “What are you doing?”

“I’m writing a list of people we need to curse when I develop my witchly powers, of course.”

Will laughs a little too hard and it makes Nico’s smile grow like his Grandma’s dreams have all come true and he really is a damned buttercup.

::

Sometimes Nico gets angry. Sometimes these feelings, toxic and poisonous and full of blue rage and hate, sometimes they fill him. They overtake him and spill through his thoughts and head and heart like lava.

Except he isn’t a volcano. Because he isn’t supposed to be feeling this, this anger that sinks upon him like black sludge isn’t normal and it shouldn’t be here. It should stick to his skin like tar. It shouldn’t follow him around like smog waiting to fill up his nose and throat and lungs again.

Until it’s all he can feel.

Until it’s all he can hear – the beat of anger, the drummer boy, stamping on his heart with sharp black boots. And he’s so angry. He feels like he’ll be angry forever.

::

They played a game on the phone.

“Describe me like a poet then,” Nico had said. “Like a Romantic poet. Come out with the best bullshit you can.”

“Er, oh God,” Will blustered. “Your hair, erm, curls like a smile?”

“Until I flatten it with straighteners, anyway,” Nico laughed, and Will did too.

“The real emo agenda.”

“That was gross, though,” Nico told him.

“I know, thanks,” Will was probably beaming on the other end of the phone line. “You do me next.”

“Your eyes are like – uh, Southern lights. Because you’re from the deep South,” Nico had said in his most solemn of voices.

Will had laughed for ten minutes and then told him to piss off.

“Think you mean the Northern lights,” he said.

He hung-up the phone – but he rang back two minutes later.

::

“He’s getting worse,” Nico says. His fingers shake around the rim of the coffee cup handle. If he was a poet he’d make a comparison, a shit one, about the bones of Will’s body, the life under his skin and the thump of the drum in his blood being as fragile as this little china mug. The worst part is he wouldn’t really be lying.

Except if he’s careful with the mug it won’t break. He can put it away in a cupboard for safe keeping. He can pack it away in a box. Label it with all sorts of things to keep people away.

Will is a person. Will lives and breathes and dreams. He beats and feels. He can’t be packaged away with extra care, he’s not a fucking mug and nobody can put him away to keep him safe. That’s not how it works because people aren’t possessions. People aren’t pretty, ordained pieces of kitchenware.

“I’m sorry,” his step-mom says. Her nails are long and painted and thump, thump, thrum, as she taps them listlessly against the table. The tablecloth is white. And new. The dirt from the herbs is washed away and Nico knows she can’t help them, whatever she says, whatever she believes, whatever he believes. “I’m sorry, Nico. I wish we could help him.”

“But you can’t,” he says. He doesn’t look her in the eye. He looks at the tablecloth and searches for smears of dirt.

Persephone is probably not a witch.

But she probably isn’t lying when she says that she is.

She can fix up china with super glue and careful handiwork when cups smash against the floor. She can buy a carpet so that it won’t happen again. She can make Nico hot meals and wash away the grime from his skin with a soapy sponge. But she can’t make Will better.

“I can’t,” his step-mom says. “Will is a nice boy.”

He deserves to live forever.

Nico is still listening.

“He is,” Nico says. “I love him.”

Things his step-mom does not say:

-          You’re too young to know what love is.

-          There are plenty of fish in the sea.

-          All teenagers say that about their first relationship.

Things his step-mom does say:

-          Okay.

::

“You’re like a tunnel?”

“Please not again, Will.”

“No, no, listen, this works,” Will laughed and Nico couldn’t see the way that his eyes crinkled but he smiled at the thought. “You’re, erm, dark and… long? And – and you always get through!”

“I’m literally breaking up with you, just for that,” Nico told him. “That was horrific. If I’m a tunnel, you’re a bulldozer. Just going around. Destroying tunnels and shit. No respect for other people.”

“True enough,” Will probably shrugged then. He was probably grinning too. “Hey, no, you’re a hole instead.”

“…Why?”

“Because you’re deep. Get it?”

This time, Nico hung up the phone.

::

Will goes back to the hospital for a few days.

Nico paces until his toes curl and hurt. Until he stops walking and realises he can’t remember which floor he’s on until he stops to look around and realises he’s downstairs. And that it’s the last place that he wants to be, because it’s Downstairs Without Will.

::

Nico likes to kiss Will until he’s certain he’s not going to disappear.

On his cheeks and on his lips and on his forehead and on his nose.

“Gross,” Will says, pushing him off. “What’s up with you and all the affection today? It doesn’t really work with your whole teen angst vibe, you know that?”

“I know,” Nico says. “That’s true.” He plays with his fingers and wishes he didn’t feel as strongly as he did. He’s like a really excellent oven with a high glare blue glow. Sometimes he wants to be a cheap, shitty hob in a university hall that barely works and doesn’t really burn. He wishes he was as bad an oven as he was a poet.

He feels things so strongly but the words to describe them don’t work.

“So?” Will blinks expectantly.

His eyelashes are the colour of spilled ink, of a dodgy fountain pen that blots and spills all over your essay, right before it’s due to hand in, and Nico tucks this away to use on the phone one day. The next time they play that game.

“So sometimes I just really love you okay,” Nico mumbles.

And Will says, “okay, oh,” and kisses Nico’s cheek and his lips are soft and wet and warm. Nico thinks about the winter.

Later Will says ‘I love you too’, but he forgets to in that moment.

His hand finds Nico’s again.

::

Will is a chess piece.

Nico is the other chess piece that moves forward and disrupts the game plan of the other player.

Nico hasn’t the slightest idea of how to play chess.

Will is a piano key and Nico is the pair of hands that slap down and ruin a simple melody with a crash of noise and offkey focus and mess and chaos and.

“Why aren’t you angry?”

Will looks up.

Weak cheeks. Nico thinks of his shit rhymes, and his shit comparisons to Romantic poets. And his shit metaphors.

“Why aren’t I angry about what?” he asks. Voice calm and cool. Like –

Glass being melted to form shapes. Little models of tigers and monkeys and dinky heart-shaped presents for that special someone.

Like sand, slipping in between somebody’s toes on the beach. The lightest, palest sand in the world.

Nico’s step-mom very slowly and carefully painting her fingernails red. Careful not to smudge.

“Angry at this,” Nico finishes his sentence. Quiet. Like a stain of dirt on the crisp white linen. “Angry at everything. Angry because you’re ill, because you’re dying.”

The word: sharp and loud and poignant. Breaks the silence of the room.

Persephone breaks a nail. Somewhere, she casts a spell.

Nico taps his foot against the floor and feels every ounce of blood that rushes through his body.

Will’s eyes are pallid and gentle and they look like the eyes of a boy who has known he’s going to die for a really long time.

“Because what’s the point,” Will says. His voice doesn’t quake. Nico trembles a lot more than he does.

His eyelashes don’t look like spilled ink after all. More like ash. In the wake of a volcanic explosion in the wrong vessel. The leftover tangents of Nico’s anger whirring away. Ash, and dust, and boys with dark eyelashes who tell him they love him.

“What’s the point in getting angry, Nico?” Will asks. “Who does it help?” he asks again. “What does it solve?”

“Nothing, I guess.”

Nico answers after minutes of silence and clicking ticking moving tocking clocks. That move in motion to the ocean wave. The drumming boy beat. The blood that rushes under veins. That fish swim through at an alarming speed.

“But it’s ok to be angry. If you want.”

He stands up.

“You don’t have to be angry. But if you want to be, you can. If you wanna scream and shout and break stuff, you can. I’m not saying that’s right. Or that’s how it should be. But if you want to, it’s ok.”

Because sometimes Will makes a bad joke and his knuckles are yellowing. Because Nico erupts and feels molten lava trickle down his cheeks, but Will is a dormant volcano and his body heaves with the sighs of unfairness and he never says a fucking word.

While Nico’s chest bursts with the rip of a pioneer heart and Will’s mom cries and Will’s dad cries, Will stands, smiling. Pallid-eyed, poetry-reading, bullshit-speaking Will. Sits, stands, lies. Sighs. Says nothing. Breaks and never says a word and he will die and he will never say a fucking word.

“Don’t let it consume you,” Nico says.

His step-mother tried to practice witchcraft this morning.

There was a smear of dirt on the table at lunch time and it made Nico smile.

“But don’t think you have to shut it all out, either,” he finishes. He pictures the bowl of mixed herbs and strange smelling salts and liquids spilling, heaving, tilting. His father swearing. Will looks at him with volcanic eyes and maybe there’s the tiniest glimpse of smoke on the landscape horizon.

“Thank you,” Will says, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

“If you want to talk about it, I’ll be listening,” Nico says. He clears his throat. Washes away the rain. Brushes away the dust. “I’ll listen forever.”

 


End file.
